Skywalking Heroes: Best Spacewalks of All Time

The spacewalk is the ultimate space experience. And among skywalkers, a few have risen above the rest and set the bar high for extravehicular activity. Here are my picks for the five greatest spacewalks of all time.

1st Untethered Spacewalk — Astronaut Bruce McCandless:
(above) In March 1984 NASA tested out their Manned
Maneuvering Unit. Although the units were only used on three Shuttle flights, this iconic image is one of the most famous from the Space
Shuttle era.

1st Spacewalk — Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov: A true hero of mine, Leonov performed the original spacewalk in 1965 with an inflatable airlock. At the end of the extravehicular activity, or EVA, tense minutes went by as he struggled to get back into the spacecraft eventually bleeding air out of his suit to pass through. An avid artist, Leonov fastened colored pencils and a notepad to his suit leg to sketch from inside the capsule. He went on to command the Soviet side of the Apollo-Soyuz mission.

1st American Spacewalk — Ed White: Three months after Leonov’s historical EVA, U.S. astronaut Ed White followed suit. The image of this spacewalk is still memorialized on Texas phonebooks — usually with a ten-gallon hat and spurs added. An extra suit glove that floated out of the open capsule door made for some interesting space debris. White said the saddest moment of his life was when he was ordered to return into the capsule. Two years later, White,
Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee perished in the Apollo 1 fire during a capsule egress test.

1st American Woman to Spacewalk — Kathryn Sullivan:
Being October 1984, selecting the soundtrack to her spaceflight meant picking what cassettes to bring for her Walkman. I met Sullivan at the
NASA 50th Anniversary on Wednesday watching Quincy Jones direct the
Space Philharmonic. I asked her what music she listened to on orbit.
"Classic music and instrumentals, you don’t want any lyrics to get in the way when you are staring out the window getting ready to drift to sleep," she said. Sullivan, who now inspires kids with science at COSI, also said the music developed for the IMAX Blue Planet was the one thing that most-vividly brought back her experience of being in space.

Hubble Repair EVA — Story Musgrave: Perhaps the most maverick of them all is Story Musgrave.
He would sleep hanging upside down like a bat to prepare for space missions and has six academic degrees ranging from medicine, to math to literature. One of the best EVA astronauts of all time, Musgrave performed three of the five spacewalks on the first Hubble repair mission in 1993 which he described as being "like a ballet." Indeed, the
Hubble repair EVAs are some of the most elaborately choreographed activities in space, involving up to 300 different tools and huge instruments, that while weightless still have plenty of inertia. On his final flight, Story opted to stay up on the flight deck and ride out the landing standing up looking out the forward windows rather than strapping in downstairs. At 61 years old, standing in 1.7 Gs after 18
days in space, without your cooling suit plugged in, for five to 10
minutes straight is pretty wild. In the end though, Story was likely too much for NASA and after six Shuttle flights, he "left to pursue private interests."

Now as the Chinese prepare to enter into the spacewalking club, and the fourth Hubble servicing mission prepares for an October 14th launch, we wish them both luck and remind them that they will be in very good company.